Tornadoes are one of nature's most powerful phenomena,
but which type is the most dangerous?
So the biggest and most powerful tornadoes
you can get on Earth, they can have
wind speeds of more than 300 miles per hour,
and they do leave a total path of destruction
in their wake.
Now, imagine that...
But on fire.
That is a firenado.
You can also get water tornadoes that form
above the sea.
You can get sand tornadoes,
aka dust devils,
that whip up sand and dust.
So what we're going to find out is
which one of these is the most dangerous.
And to do that, we're going to have to understand
a whole lot more about tornadoes.
Luckily for me, my mate Dave has a fire tornado.
What could possibly go wrong?
Tornadoes, whether they're water tornadoes,
fire tornadoes, they all work basically the same way,
which means we only need to understand one thing.
Tornadoes are formed by spinning air.
Spinning air that creates a rotating funnel
called a vortex.
A vortex which looks a lot like this.
This is a really cool way to see into
the heart of a tornado.
And it works in a similar way to tornadoes.
Apart from here, it's surrounded by
spinning water instead of spinning air.
And what I love about this is it's so simple
and it's something you can make at home.
All you need is two bottles.
I filled one with water and a bit of food colouring,
and I've taken a washer,
I'm putting it between the two bottles
and then just sealed it with tape.
Then to make your tornado, tip it upside down,
give it an enthusiastic spin,
and then you get your vortex.
And you can see it's the spinning water
that's making the tornado instead of
the normal spinning air.
And that's what's happening in every wind tornado,
which is probably the type of the tornado
that you think of when you hear the word 'tornado'.
And that's with totally good reason
because they are definitely the most common type.
And they form when hot and cold air
collide together at high wind speeds.
First, huge thunderstorms form,
spinning faster and faster as it goes,
a funnel begins to form within the cloud itself,
getting bigger and bigger
until it starts to descend from the cloud.
Then, at the point that it reaches the ground,
that is a tornado.
Now these tornadoes come in different shapes
and sizes, but their power can be immense.
The wind speeds can top 300 miles per hour.
Absolutely rapid.
And that same spinning vortex is what's
at the heart of other tornadoes, like water tornadoes.
These wet and wild twisters are known as
waterspouts and they form over warm waters,
whipping up spray from the water,
but ultimately being powered by the air
and the wind, rather than the water.
Similarly, with sand tornadoes,
more commonly known as dust devils,
these don't have huge thunderclouds attached to them,
but they still rely on that big clash
between hot and cold air,
which in the right conditions can collide
and spin upwards into a sandy, dusty whirlwind.
OK, so there's still one type of tornado
that we haven't looked at yet.
It's time to step it up a gear.
It's fire tornado time.
Now a fire tornado goes by lots of different names.
We've got fire whirl,
fire twister,
fire devil,
pyrogenetic tornado,
and my personal favourite,
firenado.
But no matter what you call them,
they are all really awesome.
Let me show you how they work.
Just in case it wasn't obvious,
this is not one to try at home.
Now we know tornadoes are all about spinning air,
so let's give it a spin.
As we spin the cage and get it up to speed.
Go on...
Can you see it?
Now it gets higher because fire is hot, so it rises up.
And as the air is spinning, it causes it to spin
and it ends up being this giant column of spinning fire.
Now this one is trapped inside our mesh,
but imagine this heading down your street
all by itself.
Oh, I want to spin it a bit more.
Oh, hear that roar.
You can see it at the bottom,
sucking in the oxygen,
the spinning air.
Look at it. That is really cool. Come on.
And the thing is, because fire tornadoes
tend to spawn from wildfires, they combine
two of nature's most terrifying phenomena:
Wildfires and tornadoes.
Absolutely pant-filling.
Every girl needs a fire tornado.
OK, now it's time for the big question.
Which tornado is the most dangerous?
There are two that we can rule out just straight away
and those are the waterspouts and the dust devils.
Waterspouts are relatively weak twisters
and they often don't last very long.
Though I am not getting in the way of one.
And it's the same for dust devils.
And with these two out, that brings us back
to the big dogs of the tornado world.
Wind versus fire.
Now, this does get to be pretty grim stuff,
but starting with the wind tornado,
the deadliest wind tornado occurred in 1989
in Bangladesh.
And it took a devastating 1,300 lives.
And compare that to the deadliest fire tornado.
Well, this occurred in 1923.
The Great Kanto earthquake and tsunami in Japan
triggered a city-wide fire whirl,
and that ended up wiping out a heart-breaking
38,000 people in just 15 minutes.
So does that mean that fire tornadoes are
the most dangerous? Well, not necessarily,
because there is a different way of looking at it.
Fire tornadoes are also incredibly rare,
so if we're looking at this in terms of danger,
then we also need to consider things like,
which is the most common tornado,
and where they're mostly hitting.
Now here, there is no contest.
It's wind tornadoes.
They hold basically every record going.
Widest tornado, highest wind speeds,
longest damage path... Wind tornado.
Location matters, too, and tornadoes happen
in loads of different countries,
from India to Argentina to the UK.
But if it's tornadoes that you're after,
there's really only one place you can go,
the USA.
The USA experiences on average.
1,200 tornadoes every year,
and many of those happen right here in the middle.
This area is called Tornado Alley, and it's called that
because it really is the ideal environment
for those severe tornado-forming thunderstorms.
And that also makes it the perfect environment
for people like this.
This big dark area is the core.
So we're basically going to penetrate
through the core and see what's interesting.
Storm chasers.
Just when most people are,
quite rightly, fleeing away from tornadoes,
there's a select few who are actually heading
in the opposite direction and chasing down
the centre of these megastorms.
But it is mostly thanks to the work
of these scientists that we know as much about
tornadoes as we currently do.
But if you do ever find yourself in Tornado Alley,
leave it to the professionals.
Because as we know from this entire video,
every tornado can be dangerous.